Kathryn Bridge

Dr. Kathryn Bridge is Curator of History and Art (Emerita) at the Royal BC Museum, Victoria. She retired in 2017 after an extensive career in which she variously served as archivist, historian, and curator. Bridge is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Victoria. Her research interests centre on archival sources, with emphasis on Canadian women’s history and art history, and children and childhood in nineteenth-century settler Western Canada. She curated several major museum exhibitions at the Royal BC Museum, including Family: Bonds & Belonging, 2017, and Gold Rush! El Dorado in British Columbia, 2015–16, which toured to the Canadian Museum of History, Ottawa. More recently she co-curated Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing – French Modernism and the West Coast, 2019–20, at the Audain Art Museum, Whistler, which then travelled to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, and to the Royal BC Museum, Victoria; and in 2023 she curated Unexpected: The Life and Art of Sophie Pemberton (1869–1959) at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Bridge has written extensively on the life of Emily Carr, illuminating little explored aspects of the artist’s early years, including within the publication Emily Carr in England 1899–1904 (2014) and the article “‘Everyone Said Paris Was the Top of Art’: Emily Carr’s French Journey to Modernism,” in Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing – French Modernism and the West Coast (2019). Recently she produced Unvarnished. Autobiographical Sketches by Emily Carr (2021). She has also written two biographies of mountaineers. Her book about intrepid women travellers, titled By Snowshoe, Buckboard & Steamer, won the 1998 B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing. In 2023 her book Unexpected: The Life and Art of Sophie Pemberton accompanied the exhibition of the same name.